[Second Stab: Curxes “Spectre” (Premiere)]

Seems like these Second Stab feature-jobbies that we made up a couple of weeks ago ARE actually useful, for possibly two reasons – firstly, whenever we type a new post on this wordpressy thingy, because of our general ineptness but now also because we’re moving at a rather glacial pace today owing to rocking out a bit too hard to Bluebell supporting those Fun chaps at Heaven yesterday evening (toooooooootally worth it) further emphasised by virtue of somehow actually getting our hands on a pair of tickets to see At The Drive In in August, Track Of The Day as an actual phrase takes too long to type out a lot of the time, and this frigs up our permalink that subsequently reads along the lines of “tr-acko-f-th-daye-blahblha”, which makes us look all stupid and shit. Then there’s the more obvious reason which serves to give us a valid excuse to further feature acts that we clearly bum but have since used up every other excuse to do so that we otherwise would have at our disposal. So, yeah, our champion Brightonian boy/girl dark synth-pop duo Curxes gets it this time round, for a brand spanking new track that they call Spectre. If previous Track Of The Day effort Creatures – much to our alarm, this was up almost one calendar year ago – was the band’s equivolant of Annie Lennox‘s There Must Be An Angel, then this is certainly speeding up the unfolding of the ol’ battleaxe’s musical tapestry where we begin to see that element of vitriol that comes with an artist gaining a shitload more confidence in their songcraftery. There is added spookiness here too, which helps given the song’s decided nomenclature – add spinkles of The Cure, and an American band we were fond of circa 2004 owing to being a complete visual and sonic oddity called S.T.U.N, atop singer Roberta’s unmistakedly British-accented and powerful vocal delivery, and you might be able to appreciate why Curxes are right now generally regarded as one of the most exiting acts currently battering earholes left right and centre in the fucking music industry.